Journalist Hit With $5,500 Judgment By Italian Court For Mocking Far-Right Politician’s Height

Italy continues to push its way towards shitshow as it’s overtaken by far-right, fascism-adjacent politicians. There’s nothing here that signals the country will try to move back towards the center. Having apparently learned nothing from history, the government continues to move further right while still (somehow!) dealing with a “woke” court.

Here’s a brief recap of what recently went down in Italy, as recounted by the Associated Press:

A judge in Milan has ordered an Italian journalist to pay 5,000 euros (nearly $5,500) in damages to Premier Giorgia Meloni for making fun of her height in social media posts.

The judge ruled on Wednesday that two social media posts by journalist Giulia Cortese, who was also handed a suspended fine of 1,200 euros ($1,300), amounted to “body shaming.”

There’s your so-called “wokeism,” far-righters. Check it out: “body shaming.” But was it? Or was it just a politician finding a convenient point of leverage in order to own the libs (or whatever their Italian equivalent is).

The name Giorgia Meloni may ring a bell, even for non-Italian residents. There’s a fierce new strain of nationalism running rampant in Italy, led by none other than Premier Meloni.

Italians who use English and other foreign words in official communications could face fines of up to €100,000 ($108,705) under new legislation introduced by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party.

Fabio Rampelli, a member of the lower chamber of deputies, introduced the legislation, which is supported by the prime minister.

While the legislation encompasses all foreign languages, it is particularly geared at “Anglomania” or use of English words, which the draft states “demeans and mortifies” the Italian language, adding that it is even worse because the UK is no longer part of the EU.

Making foreign words illegal is right up there with ensuring the trains run on time. Meloni’s background suggests she’d like to see the country return to the glory days of inverted, naked corpses of Italy’s top officials displayed in public squares following a string of disastrous military losses.

Need more? This… THIS!.. is the person who somehow found it worth her time to target a journalist for daring to call her “short.”

In 1992, at 15 years of age, Meloni joined the Youth Front, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist political party that dissolved in 1995.^[1] During this time, she founded the student coordination Gli Antenati (The Ancestors), which took part in the protest against the public education reform promoted by minister Rosa Russo Iervolino.^[16] In 1996, she became the national leader of Student Action, the student movement of the post-fascist National Alliance (AN), the national-conservative heir of the MSI, representing this movement in the Student Associations Forum established by the Italian Ministry of Education.^[17]

[…]

In an interview to the French newscast Soir 3 when she was 19,^[338] she praised Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as “a good politician, in that everything he did, he did for Italy”, ^{[339][340][341][342]} and as the best politician of the last 50 years.^[343] In January 2020, there was some controversy after Meloni and the comune of Verona supported naming a street after Giorgio Almirante; Meloni and the comune also supported giving Liliana Segre, a Holocaust survivor and senator for life, honorary citizenship. Segre said that she and Almirante are incompatible and the comune had to make a choice.^[344][345] In May 2020, Meloni praised Almirante as a “great politician”, as well as “a patriot”.^{[346][347][348]} He was the co-founder of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), who had a long post-war political career until retiring in 1987. During World War II, he was a wartime collaborator as a civil minister of the Italian Social Republic (RSI), a Nazi puppet state,^[349] as well as editor-in-chief of the antisemitic and racist magazine La Difesa della Razza, which published the “Manifesto of Race” in 1938.^{[236][350][351]} As a minister in 2009, Meloni visited Yad Vashem in Israel,^[75] and she has also said as FdI party leader that her party “handed fascism over to history for decades now” and it “unambiguously condemns the suppression of democracy and the ignominious anti-Jewish laws“.^[1]

Whatever her actual height in comparison to the mean, any tallness/shortness is the least of her problems. More directly relevant to the discussion here is this part of her Wiki entry:

Meloni has opposed the 1993 Mancino law [it], a hate speech law.^[13] 

Meloni is fine with disparaging people because of their race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, or nationality. But she’s not fine with being called short by a journalist even though she is on the shorter end of average height scale.

And here’s the other thing: Meloni was apparently more disturbed about being called short than being (accurately) portrayed as a fan of Benito Mussolini.

In October 2021, when Meloni was still in opposition, Cortese posted a digitally altered picture on X, showing the far-right politician standing in front of a bookshelf with an image of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in the background.

Meloni reacted on Facebook by saying that the fake image was of “unique gravity” and announced that she would take legal action.

In the exchange that followed, Cortese described Meloni as a “little woman.” She then wrote in a separate post: “You don’t scare me, Giorgia Meloni. After all, you’re only 1.2 meters tall. I can’t even see you.”

The Mussolini pic was of “unique gravity,” but it was the “1.2 meters tall” assertion that got this journalist slapped with a $5,500 fine. And that’s on top of the “suspended” fines, which add another $1,300 to the total.

For her part, Meloni claims she’ll give this money to charity if the judgment is upheld and the journalist’s check clears. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if that actually happens. Anyone can promise anything weeks or months before litigation is finally complete. But even if Meloni follows through with her donation promise, that doesn’t make any of this any better. This is someone powerful abusing the law to punish a critic (and journalist) for daring to mildly insult her. That doesn’t bode well for the future of a nation that’s already been through this sort of bullshit before.